Issue 0x04 - Greetings Professor Falken

💾 A monthly digest of text-based game development successes, failures, inspiration, and anecdotes from the members of The MUD Coders Guild.

Greetings, adventurers!

Whelp… it’s been a hell of a month! For one, I was lucky enough to be vacationing in Hawaii during the missile crisis. Nothing like a little global thermonuclear war scare to make you miss the chaos of 2017!

In other news, The MUD Coders Guild has decided to embark on a quest to build our own community-driven game. While we are still in the very early phases of design and development, GuildMUD is an open sourced game built on top of SocketMUD, a barebones MUD codebase written in C. If you would like to contribute to the design or development of GuildMUD, please join the discussion in the #collaborators channel, or open an issue on the GitHub repository!

Also, I would like to take a minute to thank a few of the newer contributors to The MUD Coders Blog. If you have some programming or game design advice you would like to share with the MUD community, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email, or shoot me a message on Slack. I would love to hear from you!

And, finally, I want to specifically call out a new section in this month’s newsletter: > quaff elixir. Elixir is, I believe, the single-most popular language in our community—so popular, in fact, that it has earned it’s own dedicated channel: #coding-elixir. As a result of that popularity, Elixir has earned its own section to share all of the awesome resources #coding-elixir shares with the rest of the community.

That’s it! Sorry for the longer-than-usual newsletter into, but like I said, it’s been a hell of a month!

Telnet is something that can be found at the core of the majority of Multi-User Dungeons, and this particular library should come in handy for any MUD developers who are looking to build their game in the Go programming language.

Write Yourself a Roguelike is an open source book that tackles the techniques and challenges required to create a Roguelike in Ruby. While it is currently unfinished, I thought that the community might find some interest in the content that is written, and even be inclined to contribute in the future.

A completely unnecessary evolution based story generator. The underlying simulation is inspired by a Land of Lisp exercise and drives events which are aggregated and described by a narrator. If you’re more visual, they have also included an ASCII art visualizer, provided you’re running on a terminal that is large enough to support such things.

TMCG member @eric shared the January 2018 update for his game: ExVenture. The last month of ExVenture had some big additions. New are NPC conversations and questing, along with other small tweaks to make NPCs feel more part of the world.

There is far too much to learn, and not nearly enough time to learn it. Learn X in Y Minutes helps augment that by providing clear, example-driven tutorials of nearly every programming language you could want to learn (and even a few nobody would want to learn).

I’m a sucker for custom programming languages and compilers. This article in particular is fascinating as the language used to actually build the compiler is JavaScript, the frenemy of programming languages.

To many, a bank is just a counter. It has a scale, and a grille, and a lot of papers and stamps. It has a clerk, who’s likely bored, who will give you loans and banknotes and lock your golden savings safe away. Few guess the truth of banks. Few know the crushingly dull titan of bureaucracy which keeps their pennies holds clout to rival nations.

> quit

Speak not: whisper not:

I know all that ye would tell,

But to speak might break the spell

Which must bend the invincible,

The stern of thought;

He yet defies the deepest power of Hell.

The MUD Coders Guild is a community for people with a passion for creating text-based games. Join us on Slack!